Wittgenstein's centenary essays

The Sociological Review, 1976

Journal for The Theory of Social Behaviour, 1998

Human Studies, 1997

Critical Quarterly, 1998

RCC Perspectives, 2012

teaches modern history at the University of Vienna. His main research interests are in the history of public administration, criminology, and policing. More recently he has embarked on a research project on the recurrence of biological thinking in social research and social policy with a focus on the role of neurosciences in public discourse. Benedikt Berninger is an associate professor of physiological chemistry at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. His research in neurobiology focuses on forcing fate conversion of somatic cells into neurons by a process called "reprogramming." The essay "Causality and the Brain" in this volume was inspired by his interest in history and philosophy of history. Kirsten Brukamp is a research fellow in theoretical medicine at RWTH Aachen University. She specializes in bioethics and neuroethics and holds degrees in medicine, philosophy, and cognitive science. Carlos Collado Seidel is a professor of modern and contemporary history at the University of Marburg. His main research fields are comparative European history and the contemporary history of Spain. Together with Karin Meissner, he is currently working on a research project on neurological processes during decision-making in politics and diplomacy. Steve Fuller is Auguste Comte Professor of Social Epistemology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK. Originally trained in history and philosophy of science, he is closely associated with the field of "social epistemology," which is also the name of a quarterly journal he founded in 1987. Recent publications include The Sociology of Intellectual Life (2009), Science: The Art of Living (2010), and Humanity 2.0: What It Means to Be Human Past, Present and Future (2011).

Judging from the ascendancy of formal theory in the social sciences, it would appear that Kant's famous claim that mathematics is the measure of science itself is still relevant to the pursuit of knowledge in late modernity. Writing at a time when mathematics was considered more rigorous than the natural sciences, Kant could not have known that the latter, too, would come to set the terms for what counts as knowledge in the Geisteswissenschaften. If " scientism means science's belief in itself: that is, the conviction that we can no longer understand science as one form of possible knowledge, but must rather identify knowledge with science, " as Jürgen Habermas observes, what does this mean for the study of history, culture, philosophy, and politics? In this course we examine attempts to found such study on something other than the Cartesian method of scientific inquiry and its demand for proof and certitude. Beginning with Vico's principle of verum factum (the true is made) and his refutation of Cartesian subjective certitude as the ground of real knowledge, we explore alternatives to the project of securing scientific knowledge of the human world by mimicking the methods of the natural sciences. Central to these alternatives is the refutation of a universal human nature (which can be " known, " as one cognizes, say, the structure of an atom) and, instead, the 0 0 1 F 0 0 1 F 0 0 1 F 0 0 1 F recognition (as Kant's contemporary, Herder, argued) of the tremendous variety of human beliefs, values, and feelings between people not only from different cultures or historical periods but also within any given culture. Foregrounding language as fundamentally social and the basis of human thought itself, Herder recast knowledge as a hermeneutical project of verstehen. The idea of the human sciences is irreducibly interpretive. As Dilthey would later put it, " nature we explain; man we understand. " Knowledge of human beings requires no (Kantian) theoretical architectonic, but is rooted in lived experience. Human historicity, says Dilthey (echoing both Vico and Herder), is " the fundamental fact of the human sciences. " Pace Kant, there can be no a priori ground for our knowledge of human culture because all knowing is caught up in the temporal flow of lived experience and thus bound to a sense of time and place. In the view of critics like Heidegger and Gadamer, however, late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century attempts (such as Dilthey's) to ground the human sciences anew remained hostage to the Cartesian-Kantian legacy and its concept of epistemological objectivity. Haunted by the specter of relativism that is inevitably raised by the historical-hermeneutic turn from within the horizon of scientism, such attempts never escaped the epistemological biases of the natural sciences. Any effort to develop a genuine alternative to scientism cannot succeed by merely distinguishing the different epistemological orientations of the human sciences versus the natural sciences. Rather, it must proceed by questioning the epistemological orientation itself, that is, the idea that our relation to others and to the world is one of knowing. Might it be this orientation and the very demand for objectivity that originally grounded, and continues to sustain, the modern

The Review of Politics, 2015

An anthropological commonplace since Evans-Pritchard has been that ethnographic subjects will have their rationality circumscribed by the discursive opportunities made available by a "culture." Hence, social science comes to terms with the "internal" nature of judgements (Winch). Ultimately, the relativist nature of both Winch's and Evans-Pritchard's conclusion has its source in Wittgenstein's philosophy. For Wittgenstein, "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world." Moreover, "language" in this connection extends to the "textual" nature of behavior per se. There exists a determining habituation of embodiment and dwelling as well as of reasoning, believing, and talking. This article explores the nature of a pretextual or nontextual sphere that exists beyond conventional-"cultural"-languages. Wittgensteinian assumptions are set against those of Max Stirner and Emmanuel Levinas. While in many ways disparate, the writings of Stirner on the ego and of Levinas on the "other" both insist that knowledge can be derived-knowledge, indeed, of a fundamental, even absolute, nature-by way of a transcending of a taken-for-granted symbolic, conceptual, textual, and doctrinal language-world. What is key is the attention one pays to corporeality: to the "flesh and mind" of the self (Stirner), to the "body and face" of the other (Levinas). The article is theoretical and epistemological in register. An ethnographic afterword points in the direction of how the argument might be grounded in representations of fieldwork encounters.